Likelihood to Recommend Well suited for our needs of multiple images for auto auctions from a variety of sellers. Pointing them to one platform is easier than attempting to use a variety of platforms as we were doing before (email, slack,
Dropbox and
Google Drive would randomly be used by a variety of employees )
Read full review It's helpful for top of marketing funnel writing that we can sometimes lose sight of because we are so ingrained in the product day to day. Contently is also helpful for long written pieces and ebooks that will take a significant amount of employee time to put together. I avoid using Contently for mid to bottom funnel marketing writing because my team will often have greater insight into the product function or use-case or product release, making them more adroit to the tone of the written piece and able to produce the content quickly.
Read full review Pros Flexible. This CMS can be easily extended and provide access to dynamic content Simple. The WYSWG is very easy to work with and identifying pages and content in the system is fairly easy Clean Interface. The interface is clean and uncluttered keeping focus on the content and not other factors. Read full review Consolidating my work in one place to make my work life easier Contently is unique from other content marketing organizational tools in one key way. It hands you a network of freelance professionals eager for delegated work. You can search through a database of professionals to find the perfect person for your given project. Find individuals in your budget offering the exact skills and experience you need. Read full review Cons Contentful uses "references" to allow you to build very modular content. If I have a "slider" content type, I can create a "slide" content type which references a "button" content type, and so forth. This works well, but I occasionally wish there was a better solution for one-off content, like a settings page. Currently, this is done for creating an entire content type called "settings" with a single entry. Not a big deal, but not ideal, either. There are a few quirks with GatsbyJS integration, etc, but these issues are being fixed and improved upon very quickly. A minor gripe, but Contentful does not have a way to organize fields within an entry. Entries with many fields are somewhat tiresome to scroll through. Read full review I have been using it for 3.5 years, and have had no response from potential clients. The portfolio section is pretty easy to use, but I don't love the format. Since I'm not a client, I don't know just how easy it is for them to find new freelancers or how often it is actually used. Probably more suited for some types/concentrations of freelance writers, like finance, tech, or healthcare. Read full review Support Rating I'm giving them a 10, but honestly, I've never reached out to them. I do see them putting out regular content on social media, so they might be responsive to questions there as well as regular customer support. In their posts and communication, they do seem to value their community, so hopefully, they have good customer support. And I've seen them asking for pitches from their community to publish well-paid articles during this stressful coronavirus time, and I really appreciate that.
Read full review Alternatives Considered In the past we've used
WordPress to manage documentation content.
WordPress was more flexible than Contentful but also prone to inconsistencies and we ended having a lot of hacks to accomplish various
WordPress tricks. With Contentful there's less ambiguity so content producers are less likely to go astray. We also have our own in-house programmatic template solution for managing content, but this was a previous pain point when we needed to get the dev team to do a deploy for every content change.
Read full review I also opened an account with
Skyword in 2019, which is a similar service. The person that recommended it was a travel writer, and since I've done that as well, I thought it might be a better fit. To this point, I've received no work from it either, and don't hold out a lot of hope. As previously mentioned, where I think Contently does well is by giving you an online portfolio, additional resources like a blog for learning, and a rates database for publications.
Read full review Return on Investment Positive - new hires are able to get onboarded quicker with us using Contentful Positive - we can customize the journey of what modules/material the user sees after a course/video/article Positive - it's been an overall game changer when hiring external candidates who need extensive training Read full review Contently contributors have produced some great inbound marking posts and creative materials saving our marketing team significant time allowing them to focus on more strategic plans for the business. The amount of time Contently has saved our internal creative writing staff has more than paid for itself! Read full review ScreenShots